Laptops Are About to Get Even Slimmer Thanks to LG’s New Ultra-Thin Touchscreen Panels

With the exception of LG’s G4 smartphone, traditional touchscreen technology for smart devices up to now has been created using three separate layers. There is a an LCD panel at the base, a protective layer of glass on top, and housed between the two is the “touch layer”, which houses the components that make your laptop, tablet or smartphone touch-capable. As you can imagine, having three separate layers of display alone adds some girth to your gadgets, so LG has been hard at work on an alternative to this way of thinking. As of this week, it looks like they’ve got it – according to the LG camp, we should start to see their Advanced In-Cell Touch (AIT) technology introduced into 14- and 15.6-inch laptops as early as this year.

AIT display technology is able to achieve extra thinness in the most obvious way possible – it simply removes one of the layers. Just as they did with the G4, LG is actually embedding the touch capability within the LCD itself, eliminating the need for that extra layer in the middle. To put into perspective the difference this could make, let’s take a look at a typical 15.6-inch display. The LG AIT panel would reduce the screen thickness by 25 percent, while providing a whopping 35 percent reduction in weight. And what is being sacrificed for this slim-down? Absolutely nothing. The panels will still boast 1080p Full HD resolution, and will actually be even brighter, clearer and less prone to glare than their predecessors, thanks to a lack of light loss or light reflection which would normally be cause by the cover glass. The most interesting feature lies in a benefit that G4 users may already have noticed – with AIT technology, touch capability won’t diminish if water happens to grace your screen as it does with most touch devices. And the timing could not be better for LG, who have coincided the launch of this technology with the launch of Windows 10, which is optimized specifically for touch-based input.

In an effort to make AIT technology uniform across the board, LG has also developed stylus-compatible models of the panels so that two-in-one laptop and tablet devices can receive the full benefit of the slimdown effect as well. They haven’t yet released any names or specifics as far as where we can expect to see the technology first pop up, but they have confirmed that “several global notebook PC brands” are already on board to use the new panels and that their new displays will almost certainly show up in laptops before the holidays. With the added bonus of superior precision and point calibration that AIT technology affords touch-capacitive displays, it’s hard to imagine PC makers using any other panel type a year from now.